Political Language and Metaphor

Interpreting and changing the world

Terrell Carver, Jernej Pikalo

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134114696
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Politik & Internationale Beziehungen
• Subtopic: Internationale Beziehungen

Until a century ago, a metaphor was just a mere figure of speech, but since the development of discourse analysis a metaphor has become more than merely incidental to the content of the arguments or findings. Students and scholars in political studies know the importance of metaphors in electoral and policy-related politics, coming across metaphors that are, knowingly or unknowingly, influencing our perception of politics.

This book is the first to develop new methodological approaches to understand and analyse the use of metaphor in political science and international relations. It does this by:

• Combining theory with case studies in order to advance substantive work in politics and international relations that focuses on metaphor
• Expands the range of empirical case studies that employ this category descriptively and also in explanatory logic
• Advances research that investigates the role of metaphor in empirical and discourse-based methodologies, thus building on results from other disciplines, notably linguistics and hermeneutic philosophy.

This innovative study will be of interest to students and researchers of politics, international relations and communication studies.

Part I
Science

1 The ways of stargazing

Newtonian metaphoricity in American foreign policy

Dimitrios E. Akrivoulis

One night, while quietly nestled down under a fig tree, I looked at a star with that curious passion which captures children and to which my precocious melancholy added a kind of sentimental understanding…. She [the governess] pretended to look for me and called me. I answered. She came to the fig tree where she knew I was.
‘What are you doing there?’ she said.
‘I am looking at a star.’
‘You are not looking at a star,’ said my mother, who heard us from her balcony. ‘Can one know astronomy at your age?’

(Balzac Le Lys dans la vallée)

This excerpt from Honoré de Balzac’s novel opens Eugène Minkowski’s discussion of man’s poetic encounter with nature in his Vers une cosmologie (1936: 163–72). What the quoted dialogue reveals are two contrasting ways of stargazing: on the one hand, there is the scientific way, that is, seeing the heavenly bodies in their objective materiality. On the other hand, there is the poetic way, that is, looking at the stars in a manner that frees the gaze from the confines of the heavenly bodies’ tangible existence. These are the ways of the astronomer and the poet, representing the two ideas that delimit our dealings with the metaphorical relevance of nature and science to politics.

Nature is probably the most profound source of metaphoricity, representing the widest realm to which political thought has resorted for metaphorical inspiration and reference. Particularly in the last four centuries, an alteration in the definition of science has confined this area to the domain of natural science and scientific ‘discoveries’ that have offered the most widely used and authorised models of structure and process. For example, how differently would the Cold War balance of power have been conceptualised if Isaac Newton had not ‘discovered’ the laws of planetary gravitation?

No matter how engaging such a question might be, it equally could be misleading, insofar as it leaves science intact, uninfluenced by the sociopolitical contexts of its practices, untouched by the respective specificities and necessities of its epoch. This privileging of science over politics in their metaphorical relation brings forth two cardinal and problematic biases. The first relates to a concrete, pre-scientific conceptualisation of nature left to be ‘discovered’ through scientific endeavour and then providing the natural and hence legitimate patterns for sociopolitical organisation and interaction. The second relates to the treatment of metaphors as the means for such modelling in terms of what science has already represented as natural.

In what sense could scientific metaphors then (re-)inform our political methodologies? Astronomers are supposed to look at the objective materiality of the stars in a way that offers us an accurate representation of the order and interaction of the heavenly bodies found in nature. Should we then model our political structures and interactions as systems in a similar way? Or, should we, like the boy’s mother, dismiss any possibility of imaginatively representing international politics through the employment of scientific metaphors as necessarily full of inconsistencies and imprecisions? (see, for example, Sokal and Bricmont 1998).

Answering this question presupposes an engagement with the role of metaphorical language in the sociopolitical imagination, as well as with how nature and science are treated in the process of metapherein. To put it another way, looking at the patterns and legalities ‘discovered’ in nature through science as metaphor, and thus as the linguistic modes for sociopolitical modelling, also involves questioning the claim that science is able to decipher and mimetically represent natural regularities, and thus the claim that a scientific outlook is radically distinct from a non-scientific one. The way of the poet advocated here treats scientific metaphors as deeply ingrained in political methodology, without necessarily implying the scientific modelling of politics. The relevance of this process for international politics is rendered momentous, once the employment of scientific metaphors transcends individual use and becomes embodied in political discourse. This gives rise to powerful social imaginaries and thus becomes a social form of poetic stargazing.

Newtonian metaphors in the American founding era

The history of ideas has often addressed the culture of Newtonianism as an exclusively American phenomenon, due to its deep resonance in eighteenthcentury American political thought. Some authors have even suggested that Newtonian politics continues to be the prevailing mode of political thought and action in the United States (see, for example, Barber 1984). Nevertheless, more often than not, Newtonianism has been treated as an accurate reflection of Newton’s own theories (Roche 1988: 43; Striner 1995), while its ideological content and function remain rather obscure. When identified with and reduced to the use of the machine metaphor, the impact of Newtonianism on the writers of the American founding documents is even questioned by some authors on grounds of the scarce use of mechanistic metaphors (Boorstin 1953: 79; Robinson 1957: 256). More recent accounts of the machine metaphor (Foley 1990; Kammen 1994; Cohen 1995) offer a more synthetic and systematic view of the impact of Newtonian metaphor, without fully departing from the assertions made in traditional historiography.

Nevertheless, a more thorough approach indicates that Newtonianism itself resists ‘any hard-and-fast definition or even a convenient narrative troping; it cannot be identified simply with a specific political program or a handpicked group of Newton’s disciples’ (Markley 1993: 178). Indeed, the distance separating Newton’s own theories from the culture of Newtonianism in terms of both content and aims is notable. Newton’s thought was recontextualised and its internal tensions repressed; this produced the discursive underpinnings of the so-called culture of Newtonianism. Newtonianism is the intellectual locus for diverse recontextualisations and crucial metaphors that sought to contain Newton’s original legitimating representation of the natural order.

Because Newton’s science was metaphorically deployed as Newtonianism in the sociopolitical rhetoric of the times, its meaning was constantly generated and regenerated through what could be called, following Ricoeur (1997: 95–6), the ‘living powers’ of metaphoricity. After being imported into America, Newtonianism was in a stage of constant metamorphosis, being filtered through diverse sociopolitical, theological and philosophical developments (May 1976: 25). The dissemination and popularisation of Newton’s theories intensified with parallel evolutions in science and technology, which played an increasingly important role in the lives of the first Americans, often equating Newtonian metaphoricity with the machine metaphor. This development was also facilitated by the parallel impact of European mechanistic concepts, mostly of French origin, as well as the materialism implicit in the writings of some English republicans and French philosophes. The result was the metaphorical blending of the Newtonian planetary system regulated by gravitational forces with the functions of a machine (Brooke 1956: 170). This Newtonian imaginary depicted ‘man’ as a physical object in a society obeying the same laws of attraction and repulsion as the celestial system or functioning like the highly ordered parts of a machine. After all, the recipients of this dissemination ‘were repeatedly told that what they were learning sanctioned the existing social and constitutional order’ (Jacob 1987: 137).

Although scepticism was occasionally expressed by most of the founding fathers (Washington 1939: 311; Jefferson 1950: 395–6; Hamilton 1961a, 1961b; Madison 1962: 163–4) with respect to the possibility of a perpetual or perfect form of government, Adams (1971b: 376, 1977: 135) referred to the Newtonian system, reduced to a harmonious and balanced machine, as the authoritative depiction of a balanced government. Thus, government could erect itself as its own representation, its replica, also establishing the same causal relations between human actions and physical motions. Yet in this process of re-creation, Newtonian metaphors were not always used for the same purposes and with the same meanings, nor were the images of sociopolitical balance they evoked always taken unproblematically for granted (e.g. Farrand 1937: 82, 135, 153, 421).

This diversity in content, aims and normative claims reveals a contestation less about the complexities of a balanced American government than about the internal tensions within the images of Newtonian metaphoricity. The states were often likened to the ‘planets’ of the ‘solar’ federal system of national government, with their orbits of ‘movement’ immovable, fixed and legitimated by nature itself, though there was of course disputation about what exactly the properties of these orbits really were. Similar tensions were also evident in the discussion of the checks-and-balances system of the new constitution. They were imagined interchangeably as a giant clock, a machine or the planetary system, and this was reinvoked later in times of crisis (Washington 1935; Adams 1971a: 391; Jefferson 1979: 161).

During this pristine phase of the newly formed American state, political discourse focused almost exclusively on the organisation of the governmental system. The accounts addressing the external affairs of the state were limited and mostly related to America’s relations with England. In his ‘Common Sense’ (1776), Thomas Paine metaphorically evokes a Newtonian image, likening England to the ‘primary planet’ and America to its ‘satellite’, only to reject this by referring to the ‘common order of nature’ and thus replacing this with a new yet still Newtonian image. ‘[I]n no instance’, he writes, ‘hath nature made the satellite larger than its primary planet; and as England and America, with respect to each other, reverse the common order of nature, it is evident that they belong to different systems’ (Paine 1945 [1776]: 24). Here the ‘common order of nature’ was used to destabilise the prevailing order between the two states and thus to legitimate America’s independence as belonging to a different gravitational system.

The same anxiety of the newly born state to be acknowledged and recognised as an autonomous, independent entity is also evident in Thomas Pownall’s Memorial … to the Sovereigns of Europe (1780: 4–5), where independence appears ‘fixed as fate’, and America as ‘a mistress of her own fortune’. To further legitimate his assertion, Pownall employs a Newtonian metaphor portraying an even more dynamic, almost cosmic image of the American state, depicting independence as its ‘proper orbit’. ‘This new system of power united in a moving round its own proper centre’, he writes, ‘is growing, by accelerated notions, and accumulated accretion of parts, into an independent organised being, a great and powerful empire. It has taken its equal station with the nations upon earth’ (1780: 5). Nevertheless, later in the same text, Pownall notes that America has become ‘a new primary planet in the system of the world’ (1780: 5). While this planet naturally follows its own orbit, it ‘must have effect on the orbit of every other planet’ and eventually ‘shift the common centre of gravity of the whole system of the European world’ (Pownall 1780: 5).

As the newly formed American state tried to accommodate itself to the interstate system already operating in balance-of-power terms, it had first to render this system intelligible and to discover the laws that regulate it. In Europe, the counterpoise imaginary was already frequently evoked to describe the dynamics of the balance-of-power system (de Vattel 1982). Given the impact of Newtonianism in American political discourses relevant to the organisation and functions of the new state, it comes as no surprise that this counterpoise imaginary was accommodated in the early American discourses of international relations imbued with Newtonian metaphors. The order found in the interplanetary system was thought to provide the legitimate pattern for understanding the laws that regulate the behaviour, the interests and the relations of states (Gilbert 1961: 92, 98).

Once incorporated in the American founding textuality, Newtonian metaphors contributed to the repeatability of the nation’s inaugural event in social memory as a perpetuation of the initial energy of the founding act (Ellul 1973: 335–54). This process offered a basis of identification for future generations, who came to understand themselves and their origins in terms of the ideas embodied in this founding textuality. This grounding rendered the nation’s understanding of itself possible without being delimited by the here and now of the present. It is in this temporal distance from the founding act to its future perpetuation that Newtonian metaphoricity comes into play (Mandelblaum 1977: 5–11; Ricoeur 1981: 25, 1984: 194–203, 1988: 216–19).

In this process of metaphorical representation, and as the temporal gap increased, justification and rationalisation took the place of former conviction and consensus. The Newtonian imaginary became an argumentative device that justified and legitimated what the American nation came to be. Its goal was less the mobilisation of the nation than the justification of what it had become. In that sense, the metaphorical representation of the American government, nation or individuals, mobilised in terms of a machine, a clock or a planetary system, was less an object of thought per se, than something that generated thought, the Standort from which this thought was possible (Ricoeur 1978: 47). In other words, the Newtonian imaginary animated society through a justificatory belief in the founding act, so that the righteousness, justness and necessity of the society’s existence and organisation would be affirmed.

This animation was possible through the schematising and codifying function of the modes of Newtonian metaphoricity employed, thus facilitating the idealisation of the American nation’s image of itself and of its relations with others in these early formative years of its existence, as well as the perpetuation of this new idealised image in the future (Ricoeur 1988: 218–19). With this mutation of thought into doxa, the Newtonian imaginary functioned at the level of rationalisation, as its metaphors were gradually added in the political rhetorics of the times. It hence came to provide a non-reflective image of sociopolitical reality, and by virtue of this, it made its implicit ideas about society and politics efficacious, and helped to integrate American society.

In the Newtonian imaginary, with everything reflecting harmony and order, and also being sanctioned by it, whatever existed in society and politics was considered legitimate, as long as it could correspond to the mechanised, harmonious and balanced view of political reality. This is how the discourses of Newtonian metaphoricity served as expressions of political ontology. Whatever was assimilable to this metaphoricity was legitimate, and whatever was legitimate, in turn, then existed. If the initial function of ideology is to ‘perpetuate a founding act in the mode of representation’ (Ricoeur 1981: 227), then the ideological function of the Newtonian imaginary implicit in American founding textuality was to interpret what counts as real in politics, thus resulting in a kind of ideological ‘blindness’ and ‘closure’ (Ricoeur 1986: 199).

We could say that this highly uncritical moment is but an instance of the ideological function of a Newtonian imaginary, which is full of checks-andbalances, and law-governed and predictable political interactions, in a fixed, preordained spatio-temporality. At least in the case of what has been addressed as American Newtonianism, this ideological function of the Newtonian imaginary is presented here as one deeply rooted in the founding act of American society itself.

The Newtonian constellations of ‘NSC-68’

During the founding years of its existence, the United States was imagined, as we have seen, as a new, primary planet that would grow into a powerful empire affecting and finally shifting the common centre of gravity in the whole balance-of-power system. This moment was not reached until the emergence of Cold War bipolarity, when the United States was clearly imagined for the first time as the gravitational centre of power of the ‘free world’. The imaginative depiction of the Cold War balance-of-power system in terms of the Newtonian metaphoricity of its founding years was so pervasive that the United States came to understand its expectations as ‘acts not of conscious obedience to something external but of self-realisation, of survival as what [it] ha[d] become’ (Ashley 1984: 276).

By relating the imaginative conceptualisation of balance during America’s founding years to the Cold War balance-of-power system, the focus here will be on the ideological functions of the imaginary that idealised, rationalised and repeated the initial energy of its founding act. Following David Campbell’s (1998: 91) assertions that ‘America is the imagined community par excellence’ and that ‘more than any other state, the imprecise process of imagination is what constitutes American identity’, the United States is treated here as heavily dependent ontologically upon its representational practices. In order to illustrate the ideological functions of this imaginary depicting the Cold War balance-of-power system in terms of Newtonian constellations, special reference will be made here to the employment of Ne...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of illustrations
• Notes on contributors
• Acknowledgements
• Editors’ introduction
• PART I Science
• PART II Structures
• PART III Europe
• PART IV Sexuality
• PART V Policy
• PART VI Language
• Reflections
• Further reading